


we're going to hell, so bring the sunblock

by hellbeast



Series: freedom above all things [the extended mix] [2]
Category: Bleach, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Barely Canon Compliant, Canonically Blind Character(s), Crossover, Gen, Other, Roy Mustang's No Good Very Bad Terrible Day (Year), me: throws grimmci into all kinds of ridiculous situations just to see what explodes first
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 03:30:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15282618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellbeast/pseuds/hellbeast
Summary: An AU wherein Roy receives(?) a Magical Seeing-Eye Dog(???).It is definitely, 100%NotA Dog.





	we're going to hell, so bring the sunblock

**Author's Note:**

> the absurdity behind the concept of every single FAAT spinoff is what powers me

Roy Mustang doesn’t believe himself to be easily unnerved; he’s both feared and renown for his mastery over an obscure branch of alchemy, and his political career is going well enough for him to have no shortage of enemies. Ever since Edward Elric breezed through the State Alchemist Exam like it was nothing, though, his life has taken a decided turn for the unexpected.

But he perseveres. Even through Liore, through the secret behind Philosopher’s Stones, through Scar. Through conspiracies and faked deaths and real deaths, through the Homunculi. Through _Maes_.

It’s all coming to a point, to the culmination of something that Roy is determined to live through. But he’s bleeding, barely holding himself upright on top of an array that he would’ve been happy to never see again in his life.

It never occurred to him that if he didn’t play along, if he didn’t give the Homunculi what they wanted, that they would just… _take_ it from him.

The Human Transmutation array flares with light, and Roy doesn’t think anything else.

* * *

Roy is still dizzy, head aching with Truth, and he can’t _see_ —

He doesn’t realize anything is wrong, at first.

It take an endless moment, but his migraine slowly settles into something he can bear, even if through gritted teeth, and it’s. Quiet. He remembers that there were at least three other people in the room with him before the array activated, but he can’t hear any of them.

“What the hell is that?” Izumi Curtis snaps, and Roy turns his head towards the sound, swallowing bile because it doesn’t change a damn thing, he still can’t _**see**_ , and strains his ears to pick up any more sounds.

“What is what?” Roy asks, after the silence grows long. His voice is rough, and he wonders how long he screamed, as he was dragged through the Gate.

“Feh, I thought you were dead.” Izumi scoffs, but Roy can hear the relief in her voice. Which means he can hear the thread of discomfort, too. “What did that bastard take, then?”

“I can’t see,” Roy admits, hating the way he wants to hold the words back. He’s spent the majority of career carefully picking and choosing what to share, with who and when. His lack of vision is a definite problem _and_ a definite weakness; if he doesn’t say anything, then no one will know, and he’ll probably get himself killed doing something stupid, like tripping over his own damn feet. This isn’t the time for him to become a liability.

He doesn’t expect Izumi to laugh, though.

“Shit!” She sputters, laughing so hard that it sounds like she might’ve fallen over. “Maybe it’s a seeing-eye homunculus!”

Roy—mouth open, and to do what? Snap back at her?—pauses. Izumi stops laughing, and Roy wants… He wants her to laugh again, because the indignation in his gut would be easier to face than the concept that he has no idea what’s around him right now. It would definitely be easier to face than her implication that the Truth sent something _back_ with him.

His hands shake, but Roy still reaches out. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

There’s nothing to his left, or immediately behind him, or to his right, so he grits his teeth and stretches forward.

Cold, he thinks first. Then, contrarily, Warm. Something hard, like armor, but not metal. Ridges and segments, heat hovering between the gaps. Spines and sharp points at what feel like joints. A shoulder, maybe, taller than his sitting height. Thick arms—legs?—and a wide chest and—

It. The. Something moves, when he runs his hand along it, a full-body ripple that raises and resettles those broad plates. His fingers are trembling, but he follows the lines of the body before him, leg to back to neck to head to—

It’s. It’s too big to be a dog, and it doesn’t have fur, but it has at least four legs and a broad head and it growls warningly when his fingers brush over its nose. Rounded snout and a wide head; definitely not a dog.

“What…?” He starts to ask. He doesn’t know who he’s asking, and his head is still throbbing, images flashing in his mind of Truths he doesn’t have the time to face right now—

“Are you fucking _done_?” The body rumbles, and Roy can feel the vibration of its voice—it can _talk_ —run up his arms, rattle his chest and settle firmly in his lizard hindbrain as blaring klaxons and teeth, the word DANGER painted in high, broad strokes.

“ _Holy_ —” Izumi Curtis hisses.

“You… talk.” Roy’s voice sounds faint to his own ears. He feels lightheaded.

“So do you,” the thing answers, drily. It’s so much like Roy’s own brand of humor that the laugh tumbles out of his mouth of its own volition. It doesn’t take long for the laughter to turn hysterical, into caught breath and impending tears.

His knees buckle and he falls forward against the creature, unwittingly, unwillingly, but he doesn’t have the strength to pull away. It’s warm, and his world has irrevocably just gone to hell right along with his sight, and—

The creature doesn’t move. It shuffles, at first, but Roy is too busy gasping and trying not to choke on his own sobs and trying to muffle his sobs at the same time, because there isn’t _time_ for this, because this is not the place to have a breakdown, because he hates even the thought of being this vulnerable in front of who knows how many people. But his vision isn’t miraculously going to clear itself. The Truth didn’t care that Roy hadn’t activated the array of his own accord, and he knows, now, he knows _so much_.

But the creature—some creature, nothing he knows, so big and strange that it must have come from the Gate itself—doesn’t shrug him off or pull away. Roy manages to cut himself off, to shove it all down and out of the way, because there are still things that need to be done, and when he goes to push himself up, the creature braces itself to support him. Roy levers himself up, and the creature’s shoulder presses against his right hip, steadying.

It’s huge. And it can talk.

“A chimera?” Roy asks. His voice is echoing, he realizes after a moment. He remembers that the room was made of stone, and from the sounds of it, something came down. It’s a theory further confirmed when Izumi Curtis is the only one to speak, again.

“Could be.”

At the same time, the creature scoffs:

“No.”

There’s a pause. Izumi is probably staring and Roy knows his eyebrows are raised. He reaches out with his right hand, slow. Drags it from shoulder to head, before an—an ear, nearly as wide as his palm, flicks and he draws back.

“Well then, what are you?”

The creature makes a noise, and then peels away from Roy’s side. Roy doesn’t stagger, but only just so. He feels the loss of heat—of support—like. Like his sight. Like a limb. He must make a noise, or a face, because Izumi goes:

“Whoa, whoa—”

And then the creature is back, the long line of its back pushing up against his fingers. It moves quickly and quietly for something that must be the size of a lion, at least.

“There’s no word for it here, I don’t think.” It says. Its voice is deep, deeper than Roy’s, about the same timbre as _Scar_ , of all people.

“Here, as in this side of the Gate?”

“That too.” It answers. “Mostly I meant your language is fuckin’ horrendous.”

The creature has an accent, hardly noticeable. If not for that statement, Roy would’ve chalked the slight susurrus of its words to the fact that it probably doesn’t have a mouth made for human speech, but no. It has an accent, which means it speaks something else, another language. There are more, then. Somewhere, on the other side of the Gate. More creatures who can talk, who are large and dangerous enough to be mistaken for chimera.

“Why are you here?” Roy asks.

For a moment, there’s nothing. Roy’s not one to panic, normally, but. There’s nothing normal about this, not at all. Something taps the side of Roy’s face, nudges it to the side, and Roy has to fight down a flinch. It feels flat and narrow, whatever it is, perhaps the point or side of something. There’s heat too, where there wasn’t before. Izumi makes a strangled noise.

“Someone’s idea of a joke.” The creature replies, its voice sounding from much higher up than Roy was anticipating, and he’s jerking his head back without thought. The creature is—standing up? leaning up? Its head is just about level with Roy’s own, from the sound and feel of it, and some part of it is tapping Roy’s cheek, gentle enough not to break skin. He didn’t even hear it _move_.

Roy swallows down his ire, his discomfort, his fear; pushes it all down, _down_. Not the time.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Izumi grumbles, and this time, Roy feels the displacement of air as the creature shifts away. Still close enough to touch, but probably angled in Izumi’s direction.

“I’m getting us out of here,” The creature says, completely ignoring Izumi’s question. The woman sputters, and starts to snarl out something else, but Roy is much more concerned with the feeling of heat in front of him like a steel wall. It’s as though every time he thinks he has a vague understanding of the creature, it _changes_.

“Is it alright if I touch you?” It asks, and Roy blinks, uselessly. 

“What are you going to do?”

A snort, with an accompanying puff of air, at level with Roy’s forehead. Is it _taller_ now, or just standing up all the way?

“Bring down the whole thing. Don’t like small spaces.”

“I,” Roy starts, but then a thought occurs and he changes mental tracks. “Can you use alchemy?”

The idea alone is. Terrifying.

Roy can _hear_ the smile in the creature’s voice.

“Let’s find out.”

* * *

Roy’s ears are still ringing from the mountainous clamor of falling stone. The creature—the chimera that says it isn’t—still has his right arm in a light grip, narrow points of heat and sharp edges.

Roy breathes out. His vision has, damningly, remained dark, but he can feel the wind now, can feel the warmth and heat of the sun, and feels better to know that he’s no longer trapped underground.

“Ugh,” Izumi Curtis groans, sounding nauseous. She sounds close, perhaps just to the other side of the creature. “What was _that_.”

There’s a rough scrape, rock against rock, and then a short billow of hot air. The creature—bipedal now, standing just on two legs—is… shrugging? laughing?

“Told you.” It says, blithely. “Don’t like cramped spaces much.”

Was it alchemy? The homunculi—the other homunculi?—have abilities fueled by alchemical energy, but they never, to his knowledge, used transmutation circles themselves. It could’ve been alchemy. It could’ve been anything. How is Roy going to be anything other than completely useless in this situation?

He’ll have to adapt. He’ll have to.

At the very least, he takes heart in the teasing hint of jagged coronas of not-quite-light that ripple and waver across the dark when he turns his face to the sun.

Deep breaths. Nothing else for it. Today is the day that it all comes to a—

Wait.

“It’s too quiet,” Roy murmurs, listening intently for the sounds of—anything, really. There should be the sounds of battle, or a confrontation at the very least. Fullmetal and his brother were off to find Father, and yet, it’s quiet. No soldiers. No civilians. No Homunculi. Nothing.

From beside him, there’s a curious pause, then a sound like a distant siren or bell, the drag of a wet finger around the rim of a wine glass, a strange wobbling tone that makes Roy’s bones ache from head to toe. Izumi Curtis utters a strangled curse. The chimera-that-isn’t shifts and says, “Movement, underground.”

A sigh, long and exhausted. “Those boneheaded students of mine, no doubt—”

The ground explodes.

Or, Roy assumes that’s what happens. There’s a noise, so loud that it drowns out all other sounds, and Roy throws his hands up, uselessly, because he can’t see what’s happening, where and _if_ anything is even happening at all. Gravel and dust and more noise, a sting along his arms and face, a rumble that doesn’t end. There’s screaming, words lost beneath the cacophony of rending metal and shattered brick.

“—tang! Mustang!”

A hand pulls at Roy’s arm and he twists away on instinct, his fingers falling into the automatic poise of a snap—

But he can’t see. He can’t _see_. How can he aim if he can’t—

Another hand grabs him firmly, an arm curling around his back and pulling him away, just as something else explodes or crumbles, throwing more dust, more sharp shards of brick and stone and metal, more noise.

It feels like an eternity passes before Roy can hear again. He can hear Izumi’s gasping pants, interspersed with vulgarities. An arm like solid stone peels away from his side and Roy realizes that the low, deep hum he’d been timing his breathing to is coming from the Not Chimera.

“What,” Izumi Curtis growls, still short of breath, “are those?”

For a moment, Roy is overcome with anger, with frustration, a mass of discontent swelling in his chest, because he might as well not even be here for all the help he’s able to provide. He feels like he can choke on the loathing stoking within his gut, the visceral hatred he feels now for the Truth—

“Mannequins,” the creature says shortly. “Gods, but they’re ugly as sin.”

The Truth.

“I think I can see Ed and Al,” Izumi Curtis is saying, but Roy can barely hear her over the buzz of his own thoughts. He’s an idiot. He’s an idiot because, like Master Hawkeye always chided, he hasn’t been _thinking_.

“All these things are gonna be a pain to—“

“Are they alive?” Roy blurts out, mouthing moving almost of its own volition.

A pause.

“What?”

“The… whatever they are,” Roy gestures ineffectively before him. Now that he’s listening—now that he’s not wallowing in his own self-pity, as though he’s never been stuck between a rock and a hard place—he can hear the scratch and scatter of many feet across the stone paths. “Are they alive?”

Roy has seen the Truth. It had been, in the moment, a painful torrent of information, his every nerve ending screaming in pain as the world fell into a clarity too grand for him to comprehend. He’s retained some of what he saw, felt, learned. Most of it, perhaps, if he can find a way to put the experience to paper before the memory starts to dull.

He’s never been a slacker or a dullard when it’s come to alchemy, and even less so with Flame Alchemy. But now…

“They don’t have souls,” the creature proclaims without a second of hesitation, “but they’re living things.”

“What do you mean they ‘don’t have souls’?” Izumi Curtis immediately snaps, sounding incensed. “How the hell would you even _know_ something like that?”

“Mrs. Curtis,” Roy cuts in, “How far away are the Elrics?”

Roy can almost feel the weight of their combined attention.

“About sixty yards or so.”

Roy steps forward, slowly, carefully, and raises his left hand.

“Wait a minute, what the hell do you think you’re—“

Sixty yards. Better to lowball it.

Roy snaps.

“— _can’t even see what you’re aiming at_ , _**you reckless little**_ —”

In between the milliseconds it takes for the Ignition Claws to activate, Roy reaches for the Truth.

Living creatures must create energy to move. Energy means heat. A snap creates a spark. Flame calls to flame. Roy might not be able to see, but he can feel the heat signatures, a mental map of red-orange smears: Two behind him. Countless hundreds clustered before him.

Sixty yards.

Roy has mastered Flame Alchemy, as much as anyone can claim to have mastered anything, but now the Truth rattles around in his head, giving name to what had once only been daring and cunning and instinct. Roy knows the elements, knows molecules, knows how to coax the methane from the ground, how to measure energy against distance against air, how to touch spark to gas and give it just the slightest nudge—

The concussive detonations shake the earth like a boat in a storm. Roy can’t see it—unlike the sun, the methane isn’t nearly bright enough to provide him with even the faint impressions of shadows—but each explosion thrums behind his ribs in time with his heart as the fire burns, consumes, destroys.

The—mannequins, the creature had called them—don’t have the oxygen left to scream. Spark becomes flame. Flame eats away until there’s nothing left and dissipates, smoke on the wind.

Roy exhales.

Vision or not, he’s not quite down and out just yet.

**Author's Note:**

> the first, last and only time that roy gets to be badass in this whole entire verse


End file.
